Aristotle Quotes
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For the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.
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The ideal man is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy.
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One may go wrong in many different ways, but right only in one, which is why it is easy to fail and difficult to succeed.
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The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments which rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one or of the few, or of the many, are perversions. For the members of a state, if they are truly citizens, ought to participate in its advantages.
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If a man of good natural disposition acquires Intelligence, then he excels in conduct, and the disposition which previously only resembled Virtue, will now be Virtue in the true sense. Hence just as with the faculty of forming opinions there are two qualities, Cleverness and Prudence, so also in the moral part of the soul there are two qualities, natural virtue and true Virtue; and true Virtue cannot exist without Prudence.
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If the consequences are the same it is always better to assume the more limited antecedent, since in things of nature the limited, as being better, is sure to be found, wherever possible, rather than the unlimited.
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The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants.
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Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
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We must become just be doing just acts.
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There are three things that are the motives of choice and three that are the motives of avoidance; namely, the noble, the expedient, and the pleasant, and their opposites, the base, the harmful, and the painful. Now in respect of all these the good man is likely to go right and the bad to go wrong, but especially in respect of pleasure; for pleasure is common to man with the lower animals, and also it is a concomitant of all the objects of choice, since both the noble and the expedient appear to us pleasant.
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The many are more incorruptible than the few; they are like the greater quantity of water which is less easily corrupted than a little.
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For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize... They were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.
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What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.
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The life of theoretical philosophy is the best and happiest a man can lead. Few men are capable of it and then only intermittently. For the rest there is a second-best way of life, that of moral virtue and practical wisdom.
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Time past, even God is deprived of the power of recalling.
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As the pleasures of the body are the ones which we most often meet with, and as all men are capable of these, these have usurped the family title; and some men think these are the only pleasures that exist, because they are the only ones which they know.
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In seeking for justice men seek for the mean or neutral, for the law is the mean. Again, customary laws have more weight, and relate to more important matters, than written laws, and a man may be a safer ruler than the written law, but not safer than the customary law.
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We must not feel a childish disgust at the investigations of the meaner animals. For there is something marvelous in all natural things.
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Justice therefore demands that no one should do more ruling than being ruled, but that all should have their turn.
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A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.
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...perhaps there is some element of good even in the simple act of living, so long as the evils of existence do not preponderate too heavily.
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Rhetoric is useful because truth and justice are in their nature stronger than their opposites; so that if decisions be made, not in conformity to the rule of propriety, it must have been that they have been got the better of through fault of the advocates themselves: and this is deserving reprehension.
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If, therefore, there is any one superior in virtue and in the power of performing the best actions, him we ought to follow and obey, but he must have the capacity for action as well as virtue.
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We have divided the Virtues of the Soul into two groups, the Virtues of the Character and the Virtues of the Intellect.